A manager has to know when to ignore a precise number. “He has to know that ‘larger’ and ‘smaller,’ ‘earlier’ and ‘later,’ ‘up’ and ‘down’ are quantitative terms and often more accurate, indeed more rigorous, than any specific figures or range of figures.”

I met a CIO like that. He told me his policy was to never say No to the business. So he always said Yes, and the business was always angry because things he agreed to didn’t get done, or got done poorly or far later than they wished. His Yes meant nothing.

Let me state immediately that I consider it oversimplistic and a just sales pitch (guess what’s the proposed alternative to the status quo?) but … there is A LOT OF TRUTH in the post! And we, the evil IT departments, should always keep in mind these things I’ll quote from The end of the IT department – (37signals): the list of why your It department sucks

When people talk about their IT departments, they always talk about the things they’re not allowed to do, the applications they can’t run, and the long time it takes to get anything done

If businesses had as many gripes with an external vendor, that vendor would’ve been dropped long ago.

There’s no feedback loop for improvement.

IT job security is often dependent on making things hard, slow, and complex.

It’s the same forces and mechanics that slowly turned unions from a force of progress (proper working conditions for all!) to a force of stagnation

I agree on all these diseases and I seriously doubt the solution is the new silver bullet: “today you can get just about all the services that previously required local expertise from a web site somewhere“.

Is this “you can find everything from a web site somewhere” changing a lot the way we do IT? Yes … and it’s not the silver bullet as it was not the outsourcing or SOA or … It’s a tremendous arrrow, among other arrows.

The step ahead in IT departments will not be done thanks to a ‘technology’: as I use to say “if you think technology can solve all of your problems you don’t know technology or you don’t know your problems“.

But I’m more interested in learning from you: why does your IT department suck precisely?